Category: Tips

Posted on

Why Are You Letting Someone Destroy Your Web Presence?

Why would you ever let someone or some business destroy your web presence? You think that you never would right, but you may be doing so without really thinking that your are.

In one recent case one of our client’s web host had not properly secured their server. This could happen to you too. Just because your host has a high profile name does not mean that they are “taking care” of business. A web host may host 50 or more clients on one server. If they do not have strong intrusion and firewall systems in place, if one site gets hacked all sites on the shared server may be hacked.

If your website is hacked, has malware installed on it, or is being used as a zombie spam agent, you need to ask some very pointed questions to your web host. I do not advocate moving right away to a new web host unless proper security measures are not part of your existing web host’s protocol, but you definitely need to ask some “in your face” questions and get “real” answers.

I have personally found that if you are paying $10 or less a month for hosting, that typically you are not properly covered. Intrusion detection, system redundancies, and firewalls cost money, so does a security minded IT staff. You will typically not receive this type of service from many budget hosts.  Now, not all, GoDaddy has a pretty good package and they offer budget hosting, but I have run into some that are just “hack” magnets.

Once your web host and website have been compromised you can lose your organic placement, be blocked by browsers, and labeled as a site that “when visited can damage your computer” in the organic search results. For some clients, that do not check their website daily, they can be compromised for weeks before they find out that the reason they have no phone calls is that their website has been “marked as unsafe” on Google.com.

There is too much to risk when it comes to destroying consumer confidence in your business when your website is spewing out malware when links are clicked in your site. I prefer to protect the online reputation I have by making sure that I have the best web host possible, that the most recent technology is used in their infrastructure, and that they are located in the United States as am I. It is important to understand that when you shop for a web host there is much more to consider than the price per month.

Posted on

Adobe Packages InContext Editing With Business Catalyst

I have reviewed and tested Adobe InContext Editing and felt it was a good product for clients that wanted to update website content themselves. Adobe has recently announced that it is closing the free standing version of Adobe InContext Editing and will now package it as part of the Adobe Business Catalyst solution.

Business Catalyst is much more than a website editing application it is an advanced set up business tools under one umbrella much like HubSpot. Business Catalyst’s strength will be however its significantly lower price when compared to HubSpot.

I have been testing the interface intensively and find the WSIWYG interface annoying to use for a power user such as myself who typically works in code view. To please people such as myself, Business Catalyst does allow full FTP access and can work on sites set up with Dreamweaver templates.

What I find intriguing about Business Catalyst is its arsenal of web widgets and easy to implement advanced features such as recording all form contact submissions into an integrated customer database for use by the sales team and an included e-newsletter application. The system can even set up email drip campaigns. Additionally you can do e-commerce on Business Catalyst as well with a very nice feature of being able to load all your products from an Excel spreadsheet versus having to enter each one manually.

The application allows the business owner to review on on dashboard all activity on their online business and allows sorting of information with an integrated analytics program as well. From my initial review, it looks like a very powerful system with a very low cost. This is a hosted application like HubSpot but instead of charging a monthly fee of $500 for a small site the fees range from $39 to $79 per month and only $16 per month if you only want to use the InContext Editing portion. To me the application has great potential.

One note of warning, the system IS complicated. I have personally decided that the premade templates are not a good fit for my needs, but will be testing my own template next in the application. Although this tool is not a good fit for everyone, it certainly points the way to the future of packaged business solutions. As the team says at Adobe, this is no longer just a website, it is an online business!

Posted on

How to Stay Profitable Yet Well Priced

Yes you can operate your business profitably even in a tight economy. The key is to understand your customers and to understand your marketplace. I have found that doing a market analysis is something that is well worth the time and effort before you consider raising your prices.

Several years ago when we restructured our blogging program, I did a market analysis. I priced out seven different blogging firms to identify what they offered, how they offered their services, and what their price structure was. What I found out was that our own services were so far below the market average that we had real room to not only pay our writers more, but to make a sideline business a core business for our firm.

Our approach has always been to offer great service but at an affordable price; one typically below the market average and when I restructured our blogging services I maintained this same model. Although we have had a few price changes and word count changes over the years, we have continued to show strong growth in this sector of our business.

Most recently one adjustment we have made is to move our older blog clients to blogging prices at a higher rate if they were not purchasing writing services for a minimum of three days a week. In this case, several clients have chosen to move back to a three day a week schedule instead of staying at the two day a week schedule at a slightly higher per post rate. Not only does this help the writer with more income and increased productivity, but helps to cover our overhead costs to monitor and manage client blogs with increased income.

By making sure that you provide great value and responsive service and are still priced below your competition you can increase your pricing to improve your own business profitability. Just make sure that you understand your marketplace and have differentiated your services clearly for the consumer so that your desire to improve profitability doesn’t end up chasing away new customers.

Posted on

Is Your Organic Position Dropping? What to Do About It

If your organic placement is dropping now’s the time to review what you can do to stop it. First, if you have not updated your home page content in a while and by that I mean in the last two to three months, now’s the time to make some updates. Second, if you don’t routinely add content to your website, by that I mean adding several new pages every month, now’s the time to get blogging.

For the last several clients who have called to find out why their placement on Google.com had changed dramatically, I found that both had not updated their websites in over one year. A website should be a work in progress. New content should be added on a regular basis and the home page should be changed at least once a month or once every two months, even if that only means moving things around. Keeping your website fresh is very important to getting and then keeping good organic placement.

If your website placement has significantly dropped, like from somewhere to nowhere, you may even need to review what keyword phrases you were targeting and see if maybe there are a better matches for your products and services that should be used. It could be that Google has simply arbitrarily decided that the phrase you optimized for is just not a good match to what people will actually be looking for. It could also be that the market place has changed and that a careful review of new possible keyword phrase targets should be done.

I have found that when I start to see my own site dip on my target phrases when I update my home page, change my meta title tag and meta description I can quickly pop back up in the search results. Sometimes as quickly as in seven days on Google.

If organic placement is important to your business, it is important to monitor on a monthly basis where you are on the search phrases on which you have optimized. If you don’t know where you place now, you can not create a plan to improve on your current results.